2/12/2010 @ 6:00AM

IBM Eyes The iPad

Apple
‘s iPad represents a thin, 1.5-pound wrecking ball aimed at the division between netbooks and smart phones. But it may also do collateral damage to another long-crumbling barrier: the separation between work and play. And if that happens,
IBM
wants be ready to help tear down the wall.

Earlier this week at the Macworld conference in San Francisco,
IBM
announced new business-focused apps for the iPhone operating system, including Lotus Connections tool for social networking inside companies and Lotus Quickr software for sharing documents. Those releases follow Big Blue’s launch last month of a Lotus Notes app for the iPhone that includes e-mail and calendar tools, as well as an app known as Lotus Notes Traveler that allows encrypted e-mail.

While those programs are partly aimed at tapping into the small but growing number of iPhones in the enterprise, IBM’s manager of Lotus software, Alistair Rennie, says they’re also timed to give Big Blue a foothold on the iPad, which will use the same software platform.

“Our customers are looking at the iPad and they’re excited about it,” says Rennie. “No one quite knows its use patterns yet, but it’s our intention to deliver as much of our portfolio as possible on it as fast as possible.”

Rennie says IBM will also design applications targeted specifically at the iPad, which it hopes to release “very close to the delivery date” of the device. “The screen real estate and the touch interface should give us the opportunity to do some very interesting things,” he says.

Apple’s
iPad seems squarely targeted at consumers, not BlackBerry-wielding suits. But Rennie says that the tablet, like the iPhone, will likely be used by executives who blend their home and work life and want to use their own personal gadgets to do work securely. “Peoples’ lives don’t segment neatly between work and home. The iPad gives people what will probably be a home device, but they’re still going to want to access a full suite of business software on it,” he says. “It’ll be a device our customers will own, and they’ll expect us to support it.”

Apple’s products represent one of the strongest forces in the so-called “consumerization of IT,” the influx of gadgets into companies without regard for which technology is meant for use inside or outside the enterprise, says IDC analyst Stephen Drake. While IDC estimates that there are only about 4 million iPhones being used in an enterprise setting today, the firm expects that number to reach 9 million by 2013. IDC also predicts that the number of iPhones bought and maintained by companies will grow the most dramatically, quintupling over the next four years to total more then 3 million devices.

As IBM attempts to ride that wave of iPhones into the enterprise, adding software specifically for the iPad is a low-risk bet. “It makes a lot of sense for IBM to get its solutions onto the iPhone and into the mobile space,” says Drake. “Given that the iPad uses the same software infrastructure, porting their software to that platform is relatively painless.”

Unlike
Microsoft
and
Google
, which compete with IBM in collaboration and messaging software, IBM doesn’t have its own mobile operating system to promote. That platform-agnostic approach means that IBM may be freer to develop Apple-focused software than the two other warring tech giants. “Anything Microsoft does will be first focused on Windows mobile, and Google will push apps for Android,” says Drake. “For IBM and others that aren’t tied to a particular environment, this is a good opportunity for them.”

Windows mobile–also known as “Windows Phone”–isn’t Microsoft’s only distraction from targeting software at the iPad. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in January at the Consumer Electronics Show that Microsoft also plans to launch its own tablet PC with
Hewlett-Packard
.

Microsoft has long enabled corporate e-mail on the iPhone through its Exchange software. But IBM’s Rennie argues that Lotus Notes Traveler for the iPhone operating system offers public-key encryption, a security measure that many enterprises demand, and that’s impossible without an application on the endpoint device.

IBM’s mobile ambitions extend beyond the iPhone and iPad to Android phones and BlackBerrys. At the Lotusphere conference last month, the company also announced Lotus Notes applications for both
RIM
‘s and Google’s mobile operating systems. That’s more evidence, Rennie says, of the company’s diverse approach to mobile enterprise software.

He’s decidedly less excited about Windows Phone. Even as Rennie spoke about IBM’s plan to expand enterprise software to a variety of platforms, he took a swipe at the struggling operating system. “Adoption has trickled off to an inconsequential amount,” he says. “The idea of putting Windows on a mobile device has been about as successful as the Zune.”